Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools: How Did We Get to Potential School Closures?

SCHOOLS

By Adam Powell
Correspondent

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) Board of Education currently faces a series of challenging decisions regarding possible school closures – decisions that will have monumental impacts on students, teachers, non-licensed district staff, and local taxpayers in the years and decades to come.

With the district facing a potential $2.1 million reduction in state funding heading into the 2026-27 school year, local educational leaders are looking at a variety of methods to fill the gap, including the possible closure of one or more of three Elementary Schools – Glenwood, Ephesus, and Seawell, according to a March 2026 district update, as well as staff cuts.

What factors and historical trends have brought Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools to this point, and what can be done in the years to come to slow, or perhaps even reverse, the current trends?

Enrollment trends – CHCCS Elementary Schools falling rapidly, High School enrollment increasing

Over the past decade, CHCCS has lost well over 1,000 students, from an enrollment of approximately 12,000 students in 2015-16 to just over 11,000 students in 2024-25. CHCCS’s enrollment in 2025-26 dipped under the 11,000 mark to approximately 10,700 – the district’s lowest in 20 years. Future projections indicate even steeper declines, potentially to fewer than 10,000 students over the next decade.

With North Carolina’s public school funding model largely based on Average Daily Membership (ADM), declining enrollment is a critical issue for the CHCCS district in terms of staffing, employee healthcare benefits and supplements, and facility maintenance. A drop of approximately 300 students results in well over $2 million in lost funding for the district, which places an even larger burden on local taxpayers throughout Chapel Hill and Carrboro, who already pay among the highest property tax rates in North Carolina to, among other things, fund local public schools.

CHCCS’s enrollment decline is particularly noticeable in the elementary grades, with CHCCS dropping from approximately 850 kindergarten students in 2015-16 to around 650 in 2024-25, and from approximately 970 second graders a decade ago to around 780 in 2024-25. In total, the district dipped from approximately 5,540 Elementary School students in 2014-15 to around 4,575 students in 2024-25.

Enrollment hasn’t declined across all grades. Middle school enrollment has remained relatively steady, from approximately 2,860 students in 2014-15 to just over 2,700 in 2024-25. High school enrollment has actually been increasing in recent years, from approximately 920 10th graders in 2015-16 to over 1,000 in 2024-25, and from 840 11th-grade students in 2015-16 to approximately 965 students in 2024-25. Total High School enrollment within CHCCS over the last decade has increased from approximately 3,730 students in 2014-15 to over 3,970 in 2024-25. But the precipitous drop in the elementary grades has resulted in an overall drop in enrollment – and a subsequent drop in funding.

What’s the cause?

The declining enrollment situation is attributable to a variety of factors, both locally and nationally.

Birth rates are declining nationwide, a trend that accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, Chapel Hill-Carrboro is not alone in experiencing a decline of public school enrollment. Virtually every state in the nation is dealing with this same problem. Within North Carolina, 105 of the state’s 115 public school districts reporting recent enrollment declines.

A larger local issue is that Chapel Hill has an aging population, with more residents aged 65 and older moving in over the past couple of decades than those with young children. This is primarily a housing issue, with much of Chapel Hill’s housing stock tied up in undergraduate and graduate student housing for UNC-Chapel Hill – much of it dormitories and rental apartments – and high-income housing in neighborhoods such as Meadowmont, Southern Village, and Lake Hogan Farms, among others.

Declining public school enrollment is just one of many reasons why Chapel Hill’s municipal leadership has prioritized the construction of so-called ‘missing middle’ housing in recent years. While this policy may help future CHCCS enrollment figures, it certainly hasn’t helped the district keep pace over the past decade.

Simply stated, local homebuilders didn’t prioritize creating housing for young families for quite some time. And that gap has resulted in swaths – literally thousands of people each year – leaving Chapel Hill upon receiving their undergraduate and graduate degrees, and moving to surrounding counties where affordable housing is in higher abundance.

A prime example of this trend is the town of Mebane, located approximately 25 miles from Chapel Hill, which features a sizable number of UNC-Chapel Hill alums who either couldn’t afford a home or couldn’t justify renting in Chapel Hill when they could buy a house with land and amenities in a cozy bedroom community. Many Mebane residents, in fact, commute to Chapel Hill daily for jobs at UNC but can’t live here due to high housing prices and limited housing stock.

While Mebane is growing exponentially – and the Alamance-Burlington School System is currently considering redistricting local elementary schools to better distribute its growing student population – many of Chapel Hill’s elementary schools are seeing declining enrollments.

In addition to Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s aging population and relatively high housing prices, there are other, more education-specific factors. Families – concerned about bullying, inadequate funding for public schools and the threat of public school violence – increasingly are choosing alternative education options.

North Carolina has seen an explosion in the enrollment of charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling over the past decade, and particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic – a period in which CHCCS has seen its enrollment dip from approximately 12,300 students to less than 11,000 students, and charter school enrollment has boomed.

Virtual public schools such as the North Carolina Virtual Academy and North Carolina Cyber Academy have made it easier than ever for students to receive a public school education in North Carolina without attending a brick-and-mortar school.

In addition, increased state funding for voucher programs, such as the North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program, has made it easier for local families to move their children out of public schools and into private schools.

What Can Be Done?

Chapel Hill’s local leaders are looking at a wide range of policies and actions to mitigate the impacts of CHCCS’s public school enrollment declines and the subsequent loss in funding.

In April, CHCCS announced the cutting of 19 full-time positions across the district, mostly in Central Office and administrative roles. While the loss of these positions will challenge the district’s ability to navigate a range of issues – notably family/student support services – the cuts will not drastically impact classroom teachers or facility maintenance, which administrators consider the most crucial roles throughout the district.

In the fall of 2024, local voters in Orange County approved a $378 million bond referendum, which provides approximately $175 million to replace aging facilities such as Estes Hill Elementary School, Frank Porter Graham Elementary School, and Carrboro Elementary School. As a result of this referendum, these schools are not under consideration for closure.

The Chapel Hill Town Council is making affordable housing a cornerstone of its legislative agenda, which should, in theory, help the local area better accommodate population growth.

With population growth comes the expectation of more families with school-age students. And with local governments making affordable housing a top priority, Chapel Hill and Carrboro will be much better equipped to grow more equitably and evenly across economic and demographic lines than in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the town was more reticent to zone and construct lower- and middle-income housing.

The bottom line is that CHCCS remains a strong school district. It is, in fact, one of the highest-achieving public school districts in North Carolina. For example, its on-time graduation rate of 93.9% in 2023-24 surpassed the state average by 7 percentage points, while its 69.8% pass rate on state exams was the highest in the entire state. Not a single CHCCS school received an ‘F’ performance grade in 2023-24, a year when roughly a third of all North Carolina public schools received a failing grade.

However, the demographic trends in Chapel Hill – combined with local housing and budgetary pressures – have created a dynamic that requires action sooner rather than later. And while highly inconvenient for many people around town, those actions have already included staff cuts, and may very well result in school closures before all is said and done.

Adam Powell has been a correspondent for The Local Reporter since 2023. A 2001 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Powell has served as managing editor of multiple local publications, including the News of Orange County, the Mebane Enterprise, the Caswell Messenger, and the ACC Sports Journal. The author of four books. Adam currently resides in Mebane with his wife Julie and children Colt and Jenna. This reporter can be reached at:Information@TheLocal Reporter.pressat:Information@TheLocal Reporter.press